The story was front-page news in the sunrise edition of the paper. CITY WOMAN SLAIN, CARNIVAL WORKER CHARGED. The dead woman, Flora Nuñez, twenty-six, with a Lower Highlands neighborhood address, had been strangled, more details pending. A carnival patron, going to retrieve a thrown Frisbee, had found the body. Within an hour of the discovery, the report continued, Lowell police had arrested a carnival roustabout named Troy Pepper, thirty-four, of Nutley New Jersey, and charged him with the murder. Witnesses placed him and the victim together several hours before she was found, which he admitted to. Unnamed physical evidence recovered from his trailer at the carnival site linked the man to the crime.
I looked up from the story at the knock on my open office door. Fred Meecham, my attorney neighbor, stuck his head in. “You read about last night?”
I put down the newspaper. “I was there.”
He shut the door, not that we needed the privacy; my waiting room was empty. He came in and sat down. “You were at the scene?”
Leaving out my near heroics with the hammer, I told him how I had come to be there when Flora Nuñez’s body was found.
“I just came from police headquarters. Nobody mentioned that.”
“I wasn’t one of the people who found her. The cops talked mostly to them. I hung around in the event they decided to cast their net wider, but they didn’t. We stuck till homicide and an ambulance got there, and then cleared out to let them do their job. I was long gone when they busted this—” I broke off. “Fred, am I reading into this that you’ve got a job to do, too?”
Meecham pushed back his wave of brown hair, which flopped down again at once over his forehead. “I’ve been retained in the case.”
“To represent this—” I scanned the column for the name.
“Troy Pepper. Yes.”
“Court appointed?” I knew he did pro bono work.
“Nix, I’m hired. The carnival boss telephoned me first thing this morning and said he wanted legal representation for Pepper. He got my name from someone out there.”
“Lucky you. It doesn’t sound like you’ve got much of a case, from what I read here.”
“Inculpatory evidence is strong. In fact, the only thing I hear to the contrary is from the person who hired me. He doesn’t believe Pepper did it.”
“That must be a comfort.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Are you angry about something?”
Was I? Last night had been one of those dream dates, until that awful moment of the scream, and the sight of the dead woman had shaken Phoebe badly. I was miffed because the police seemed to have made it a point to ignore me, though that could just be an ex-cop’s paranoia. Or perhaps I was upset by yet another act of violence done to a woman by a man, and I was tired of wondering when it would ever stop, sick of men’s weakness, bitter at the way it reflected on all of us.
“You sound it, anyway,” Meecham added.
I murmured and left it at that.
“Well, if so, that’s good, I think. Even the fact that you aren’t on record with any statement is a plus.”
I set down the newspaper.
“It might serve you well,” Fred went on. “That is, if you’re willing to take on an assignment. It dropped on me, and time’s short. The
arraignment is in an hour. I’ve got that covered, but I’m going to need help pulling details together in order to see what we’ve got.”
In this business that’s how it often goes. People in trouble don’t comparison shop. When they suddenly need an attorney or a PI—or an undertaker—they’re inclined to grab whoever is at hand. Actually, I had enough insurance work to keep me going right through the holidays if I played it right. It was a good, steady gig that I could run mainly from my desktop and telephone, and it didn’t require much shoe leather or sweat, many dealings with officialdom, or so much as a whisper of adrenaline. Maybe that’s what was wrong with it. Something in me had stirred last night, some old yen for the hunt, an impulse to set things right. I drew myself up sharply. Did I just think that? An impulse to set things right? Good Lord deliver us from a PI on a mission. “I don’t know, Fred.”
“When can you start?”